Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

The fundamental failing of all the mainstream Linux DEs - not just the GUI shells but the apps that run on them too - is that they all play to the competition's - i.e. MS and Apple - strengths when instead they ought to be playing to their own - i.e. *nix - strengths. Everyone involved in creating the first Linux desktops instantly forgot everything they ever knew about Unix Philosophy: keep everything small, simple, highly modular, endlessly composable, agile, adaptable. [1]

LXDE can be probably considered quite mainstream by now, and is relatively "*nix philosophy" ...so far (so good)

Also, you mention word processors, and there is a whole collection of tools filling largely that role and in a "proper" philosophy: TeX and so on (also quite easy to use LyX) - problem is, people don't seem to want to use such too much, preferring the ~closed monolith model which allows them to manually tweak the layout (with usually much poorer results than a proper typesetting system would give)